It's starting to look like a campground around here!
If you have been keeping up with our build progress, then you will know we have completed quite a few steps in the process of building out the campsites. If you haven’t been following along, what are you doing?! There are a lot of things going on around here! Don’t worry we won’t hold it against you, but just to bring you up to speed here are some of the things we have gotten done over the past couple months for the campsites:
Completed the layout for 17 sites
Installed electric pedestals
Planted trees
Put picnic tables together
Ordered and picked up fire rings
Screened tons and tons of rocks
As exciting as all those steps are, laying out the base for the sites is arguably one of the most important steps, and not an easy one. There is no question that if we didn’t have a backhoe, things would be a lot more challenging. Between all the rocks and dirt that have needed to be moved, it has come in handy!
One of the first things that needed to be done was crushing all the rock to be able to use it as the base. To our advantage, we have a lot of old concrete and large river rocks on our land that we were able to recycle and use to start creating this base. There is no question that Scott got his workout in while breaking down all of the old large pieces of concrete with the sledgehammer!
Once most of the concrete was broken down into small enough pieces it was time to transport it over to the campsites. We did also have about two truckloads of rock delivered, so we combined what we crushed ourselves with the rock that was delivered to us so it would make the perfect blend once smoothed out on the ground. While Scott was dumping the rock at each site, I was then in charge of spreading it out with a rock rake to make it as even and level as possible. I have never used a rock rake before, but I will say that if you are looking for a good ab workout, raking rocks is a great one!
After there was a decent layer of rock smoothed out at the site we would then use a plate compactor to really push the rock into place. If you have never used one before, it almost feels like pushing a lawnmower super slowly, but instead of chopping grass, it is compacting the rocks into the dirt creating a sturdy base. This was probably one of the slowest parts of the whole process, but the results are amazing!
